Principal Platform Engineer

ACI Worldwide•Norcross, GA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Platform Engineer is a senior individual contributor and technical leader responsible for shaping, scaling, and governing ACI’s internal platforms as products, not projects. This role operates at the intersection of architecture, developer experience, cloud platforms, DevSecOps, and organizational enablement. You will define paved roads and golden paths that enable product and delivery teams to move faster with confidence—while operating within clearly defined security, compliance, and financial guardrails. You will also act as a technical multiplier, mentoring senior engineers, influencing architectural direction, and ensuring platform capabilities are designed for scale, reliability, and inner‑sourcing.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in software engineering, devops, cloud, or platform engineering roles.
Deep hands‑on expertise with: Kubernetes and/or OpenShift
Deep hands‑on expertise with: CI/CD systems and SDLC tooling
Deep hands‑on expertise with: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation, etc.)
Deep hands‑on expertise with: Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
Proven ability to influence architecture without formal authority.
Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex topics to diverse audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience operating platforms at enterprise scale with strong governance requirements.
Background in customer‑managed or regulated environments.
Experience defining or operating an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
Familiarity with DevSecOps tooling, policy‑as‑code, and FinOps practices.
Experience contributing to or leading inner‑source initiatives.

Responsibilities

Serve as a technical authority for platform architecture across build‑time and run‑time domains (CI/CD, Kubernetes/OpenShift, cloud infrastructure, secrets, observability, and delivery tooling).
Define and evolve reference architectures, platform standards, and design guardrails aligned with enterprise security, compliance, and FinOps expectations.
Lead architectural design reviews and proactively guide teams away from bespoke or non‑scalable solutions.
Drive cloud‑agnostic and hybrid designs, supporting customer‑managed, SaaS, and on‑prem deployments.
Treat platform capabilities as products with roadmaps, clear ownership, success metrics, and adoption goals.
Design and maintain golden paths for common developer workflows (build, test, deploy, operate).
Partner with Product, Client Delivery, and Engineering teams to reduce cognitive load and delivery friction.
Ensure platforms are self‑service, automated, and documented, minimizing ticket‑driven workflows.
Lead adoption of everything‑as‑code practices (IaC, policy‑as‑code, pipelines, configuration).
Embed security, quality, and compliance early (shift‑left) into platform workflows.
Influence CI/CD standards, testing frameworks, artifact management, and release automation.
Drive consistency across GitHub, pipelines, branching, and SDLC tooling.
Provide deep expertise in Kubernetes and OpenShift, including multi‑arch, multi‑cloud, and customer‑managed environments.
Guide platform support for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Red Hat OpenShift with a consistent operating model.
Define Day‑0, Day‑1, and Day‑2 operational tooling (installers, upgrades, health checks, DR, secrets rotation).
Act as a mentor and technical coach for senior and staff‑level engineers.
Set expectations for high‑quality design documentation, ADRs, and knowledge sharing.
Promote and enable inner‑sourcing, making it easy for product teams to contribute back to the platform.
Be accountable for onboarding success of new engineers through guidance and technical stewardship.
Champion AI‑assisted engineering practices embedded into everyday workflows (testing, reviews, documentation, insights).
Help define guardrails for responsible AI usage within platform engineering.
Explore and prototype AI‑enabled platform capabilities that improve developer productivity and platform reliability.